title: Association between individual differences in self-reported emotional resilience and the affective perception of neutral faces.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Resilience, i.e., the ability to cope with stress and adversity, relies heavily on judging adaptively complex situations. Judging facial emotions is a complex process of daily living that is important for evaluating the affective context of uncertain situations, which could be related to the individual's level of resilience. We used a novel experimental paradigm to test the hypothesis that highly resilient individuals show a judgment bias towards positive emotions.
  
  
  METHODS
  65 non-treatment seeking subjects completed a forced emotional choice task when presented with neutral faces and faces morphed to display a range of emotional intensities across sadness, fear, and happiness.
  
  
  RESULTS
  Overall, neutral faces were judged more often to be sad or fearful than happy. Furthermore, high compared to low resilient individuals showed a bias towards happiness, particularly when judging neutral faces.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  This is a cross-sectional study with a non-clinical sample.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  These results support the hypothesis that resilient individuals show a bias towards positive emotions when faced with uncertain emotional expressions. This capacity may contribute to their ability to better cope with certain types of difficult situations, especially those that are interpersonal in nature.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92037-0985, United States. esarce@ucsd.edu
authors.forename: Estibaliz
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Arce
authors.forename: Alan N
authors.initials: AN
authors.lastname: Simmons
authors.forename: Murray B
authors.initials: MB
authors.lastname: Stein
authors.forename: Piotr
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Winkielman
authors.forename: Carla
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Hitchcock
authors.forename: Martin P
authors.initials: MP
authors.lastname: Paulus
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D000339:Affect; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D002755:Choice Behavior; D003430:Cross-Sectional Studies; D005149:Facial Expression; D005239:Fear / Q000523:psychology; D005260:Female; D006240:Happiness; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007600:Judgment; D008297:Male; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010555:Personality Inventory; D021641:Recognition, Psychology; D055500:Resilience, Psychological; D012938:Social Perception; D055815:Young Adult